18 Comments Add your own

• 1. Jason Parker  |  January 26th, 2007 at 9:49 pm

  The is completely awesome. Hands down, the most interesting, innovative thing that I’ve seen anyone do with online news. This is actually a useful looking application. It looks like Nintendo put a lot of thought and effort into this. This is definantly not some gimick or afterthought, and I like it.

• 2. Michael Gorman  |  January 26th, 2007 at 10:31 pm

  Dear… God….

  How soon I send my feeds into those series of tubes?

• 3. MItch  |  January 26th, 2007 at 10:31 pm

  Wow.

  Now imagine using podcasting and RSS to push the video into the box.

  Imagine Apple putting this into Apple TV.

  Imagine the ability to customize it to grab the news you’re interested in and present it to you, with the video already pushed into it.

  Imagine it using some kind of open standards so that any local station can create such a channel.

• 4. Michael Gorman  |  January 26th, 2007 at 10:32 pm

  … er, How soon CAN I send…

  Can the Wii proofread yet?

• 5. discreet_chaos  |  January 26th, 2007 at 11:07 pm

  OK - I don’t play video games and there’s a morning paper delivered to my door, so maybe I’m just missing something or failing to understand.

  But, judging from the video and the article linked from the last post; It looks like AP wire stories, you can access from a menu, a map or a replica of an old Pointcast player.

  It’s the AP wire, so you can get that news from any number of places and though the USA Today thing doesn’t say whether they have an exclusive contract for two years, I’ve not seen anything that says they’ll be opening it to other sources. Any way you look at it, if someone else were able to deliver content, one would think they’d have to get access through Nintendo and I assume it’ll cost a fee..

  Maybe I’m wrong or I’m missing something and please don’t misunderstand; The map thing looks cool and I heart my Associated Press, but it’s still just the AP, a pointcast player and a map.

• 6. Barney Lerten  |  January 26th, 2007 at 11:29 pm

  I’m with you, discreet_chaos. Underwhelming. News as video game. Mixed with Jumble as you zoom in or out.

  Creating new ways to view the news? Fine and dandy. But to pretend this early 21st-century Pong/Prodigy/AP mashup is something revolutionary - well, sure, give me a video wall in my house and I’ll create my own Situation Room, but I doubt it’d look like THAT. (Anyone here old enough to remember the first low-end desktop publishing program, The Newsroom? I still have the box and software around here somewhere…;-) Then again, everyone furnishes their house differently, don’t they?

  Since it’s the Wii and I have some lbs. to lose, maybe what I DO want is something that teases me with a headline but won’t let me read the next graf or two until I’ve jogged a quarter-mile. Now THAT’d do me some good;-)

• 7. discreet_chaos  |  January 27th, 2007 at 12:35 am

  Hey Barney - According to the article, they hope to deliver video to the television.

  —
  The other day, I ran across my copy of PC Write from the mid-80s;
  First you boot to DOS, then you take out THE disk and insert the one from IBM.
  —

  OK Safran, I’ll quit snarking and the map does look cool. It may even be helpful for those who need a visual cue or to entice the kids.

  But, if you will be able to drill-down to city level, wouldn’t you end-up with a pile of articles that don’t have an address and for that matter, how many things would be stacked on city hall?

• 8. Safran  |  January 27th, 2007 at 8:16 am

  Analogies to old, pre-web technologies aren’t gonna do it anymore. You can’t think the way we do. Think from the POV of someone who spends their casual hours gaming instead of watching TV. Now they’re going to get news off the platform, too. Soon - video. Programming. Local info.

  There’s no reason why Wii (and its ilk) can’t eventually circumvent all traditional forms of distribution.

  We don’t do Lost Remote to think small, ya know? But the one thing I’ve learned in the last 7 years here is that thinking about a new technology in the terms of the old technology doesn’t work. Neither does underestimating the gaming community.

  I have NO idea how this will drill down or what evolutions it will make. But I’m comfortable in saying they are on the right track and have come up with a new way of communicating with a non-traditional news audience. Dismiss at your own risk.

• 9. thedetroitchannel  |  January 27th, 2007 at 10:45 am

  i mentioned about a month ago that my college age son set out to build the hummer of dance pads for dancedancerevolution…actually 2 of them so they could play against each other.

  we needed a basic set of hand controllers to wire into, and set off for game stop. they have 3 stores in a 2 mile radius in one suburb here. it amazes me every time we walk into any one of them the crowd that is there…AND SPENDING SERIOUS MONEY.

  sure, it’s alot of kids, but most are with parents and alot of laughing and generally good fun is goin’ down.

  it’s evident they are after this demo with this application.

  funny, i don’t remember seeing kids lined up 2 and 3 deep at best buy watching the 100’s of tvs on display.

  btw- the dance pads are in chicago and have been a hit at two house parties; going strong without even a hiccup.

• 10. Barney Lerten  |  January 27th, 2007 at 2:32 pm

  Sarfan, many of us out here in the Real World (yeah I include you) are in a small, rickety boat, on choppy waters, trying to navigate safely between the tall cliffs of “Everything MUST and WILL change!” and, on the other side, “NOTHING will change, so just keep on keepin on.”

  There is a middle ground, and I’m far from alone. Dismiss? No, I don’t turn up my nose. I don’t pretend to ‘get” what I don’t get. I’m not gonna be an old geezer trying to “get down and funky.” I am who I am (Popeye-speak.)

  I appreciate and actually agree with much of what I read/hear here. But not all of it, That’d be silly. It’s the dialogue and, yes, debate that gets us moving forward. Hope you agree.

• 11. Barney Lerten  |  January 27th, 2007 at 2:46 pm

  Dang, your first name is Steve. I don’t go calling folks by last name like that. Sorry;-/

• 12. Safran  |  January 27th, 2007 at 3:21 pm

  Barney: I’d be shocked, indeed, if there were anyone who always agreed with me. (So would the LR Spouse.) I love a good, well-thought-out disagreement. I want people to challenge what they read. Journalism is supposed to be about questioning.

  So do you disagree that this is a major development?

• 13. discreet_chaos  |  January 27th, 2007 at 6:19 pm

  Uh… Pointcast developed “push” technology which was the foundation of RSS. They were one of the darlings of the bubble, they had a distribution deal with MS and Murdoch wanted to buy them, but poor management and the fact that the tube weren’t large enough at the time was what did them in for the most part.

  Google it up and look at some images, but take away the map and the zoom, Pointcast looked a lot like the Nintendo thing and that includes the menu. So, I’m not sure how that’s “pre-web”. Push technology and the option of getting your news via a slideshow or a menu was first done in ‘96/’97 and the internet was the only way it could’ve happened.

• 14. discreet_chaos  |  January 27th, 2007 at 7:20 pm

  And, I guess I should also add, though I don’t want to fight and it’s gaming, so it has nothing to do with me;

  Anyway - I’m all in favor of anything that might get kids excited about the news, but I don’t see a lot of people buying the machines just for the map. If anything, it’s a way for Nintendo to differentiate themselves from their competition and to give kids something to point toword, which may be of interest to their parents.

  I haven’t searched the patent library or looked at anybody’s contract, but offhand, I’d say that it may present an opportunity for Yahoo!. Not only could they do the may, if they wanted, but if they were to lockup a distribution agreement and add their huge numbers of news outlets, then it could help them establish a brand identity with those who have the machine. And, of course, Microsoft could just as easily add the feature to their gaming console, they’ve got some technology in-house that could help them do it and they know where to license the rest, plus if they were to marry it to their terraserver images, you could theoretically drill down and see the actual house.

  Though, once again, the map look cool, but how many AP stories have a dateline of NYC and if they’re just thrown into a big pile, how would that help and are their any indications that Nintendo is going to open this up to anyone other than the AP?

  I don’t know, but I thought the gaming consoles all had browsers inside. The article says that Opera is required, along with a broadband connection. So, once again, we’re really just back to the map.

• 15. discreet_chaos  |  January 27th, 2007 at 7:23 pm

  Obviously, I really, really miss the preview option for comments.

• 16. Uncle Rupert  |  January 27th, 2007 at 7:39 pm

  Well, my Time Warner bill keeps going up but they now offer the Papa John’s recipe on one of the on-demand channels. I can’t order a pizza with my remote, but I still think there is a lot of potential with the interactivity of the Wii.

• 17. Hussman  |  January 29th, 2007 at 6:40 am

  I really like the multiple ways to access stories, particularly the way to spin the globe and look at it all.

  I’m still not convinced that it is super-revolutionary though. Remember the steps that are involved to get to this. You have to turn on the Wii, access the channel, then surf through. Also, I can’t do anything else while doing this - like check out other websites.

  I can accomplish all these things if I open all my daily bookmarks in tabs in Firefox.

  Still, it’s a step. It is hard to deny the visual appeal of it all.

• 18. Wilson  |  January 29th, 2007 at 8:50 am

  Why doesn’t anyone in the news business get that the news will evenutally become a subscription service paid for by subscribers who pay or who agree to watch targeted advertising aimed at them?

  Revenues will be earned by the news gatherers by people downloading the videos (for perhaps a few cents) and viewing them then or at a later time.

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